After Orlando, slight cracks in gun-rights’ grip on Congress

In order to succeed with the current party split in the Senate, legislation needs support from both sides of the aisle, so those advocating any changes to gun laws have shifted their hopes to Collins’ compromise proposal, even though it’s a narrow sliver of what gun control advocates had called for after the massacre Jun 12 in Orlando. Nearly any popular and previously debated gun control measure would have made a better symbolic lost cause.

Little remembered is that in the late 90’s the NRA brought to the Senate and House a comprehensive gun safety bill.

Think about those numbers and, now, think about how many people in America have been killed by Muslim terrorist shooters this year.

The FBI will be alerted if a person who has been on the broader Terrorism Screening Database in the previous five years buys a gun, but the sale won’t be prevented. The man charged with killing Jo Cox MP had a manual on building guns from an American publication.

“All of Me” singer John Legend hinted about the need for voters to be wiser with their choices.

But only eight of the 54 Republicans in the Senate joined Flake and Collins in protecting the measure.

That could lead to an overturning of District of Columbia v. Heller, which vastly expanded individual gun-ownership rights.

A point made by the second article in The Guardian’s series leads me to another question: what are responsible gun owners willing to do prevent everyday violence involving small firearms? “The country agrees that something has to be done”. “And, they’re also trying to violate the Second Amendment by taking guns away from law-abiding Americans”. On the Governing website, it notes that Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland, Iowa, Nebraska require background checks to purchase a handgun. CT and NY passed their bans after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Many of these states aren’t free from gun violence.

Where it does exist, gun control in the U.S.is a state and local government responsibility, but inconsistent gun laws across counties and state borders make it hard to effectively implement. It is time, however, to have some frank discussion about guns.

Here’s the problem, Dick Gephardt the Democrat leader in the House wanted to run for President and openly admitted that he needed gun control as a “wedge issue” for the next election. However, this isn’t an option for most Americans.

The four measures to tighten gun laws that got shot down in the Senate on Monday provided further evidence that Donald Trump can’t even get right with his supporters, much less enemies in his own party. “How do we deal with guns?”

There’s support in Congress for gun control, but Democrats and Republicans differ on what that means.

As a moderately liberal Democrat, I have no issues with the 2 Amendment and have no desire to disarm American citizens and strip them of their constitutional rights. There is this thing called due process, look it up – it’s in the Constitution.

Skeptics retort that annual gun homicides have decreased 40 percent since 1993, but this is a misleading statistic. In other words, it would eliminate an obvious and carefully preserved loophole in a system created to help keep guns out of the wrong hands. Does Kim’s criteria include people who suffer from depression? Newtown and Orlando energized millions of people. It’s unsurprising when one considers that in the USA there were 88.8 firearms per 100 people in 2007, compared to just 31.3 in Norway and 30.8 in Canada. That’s a highly optimistic viewpoint that presumes we could always tell the difference before anyone gets a gun. If a few people lose their right to buy because they’re caught up in the hundreds of thousands of people investigated for terrorism, so what?

What becomes clear with the tide of public mass shootings is the failure on the part of the United States government to place checks on the ownership of guns and a lack of stricter laws ensuring gun control.